After 150 years, Chicago still lacks a proper Great Chicago Fire monument
The Great Chicago Fire of Oct. 8-10, 1871, is not just one of the most momentous events in the city’s history but also one of the largest urban fires of all time. It blazed on for some 30 hours, with flames so hot they reduced stone buildings to dust. It destroyed a third of the city, including the entire downtown, and left more than 90,000 of the city’s 324,000 people instantly homeless.
Yet there is no appropriately grand monument in the city.
Consider, by contrast, what Londoners did after their Great Fire of 1666, the Great Chicago Fire’s closest historical equivalent. London’s monument, begun in 1671 and completed six years later, was designed by famed architect Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke. They specified that the height of the Doric stone column, on top of which is a gilded urn of fire, would be exactly 202 feet. That’s the distance between the monument and the spot where the fire began, the bakery of Thomas Farriner, London’s counterpart to the barn of Catherine O’Leary.
Not that Chicagoans didn’t try to build a fire monument.
As the anniversary of the Chicago fire approached, West Side park commissioners asked architect William LeBaron Jenney to design a suitable memorial. On Oct. 30, 1872, city officials and other dignitaries looked on as workmen laid the cornerstone of the monument near the Washington Boulevard entrance of what is now Garfield Park. Stalled by the financial panic of 1873, the project never went any further. The cornerstone was unceremoniously removed in 1882.
A few months before the cornerstone was unearthed, the Chicago Historical Society (now the Chicago History Museum) noted the 10th anniversary of the fire by placing a commemorative plaque on the stone-clad house that had replaced the O’Leary pine shanty on the north side of DeKoven Street, a little east of Jefferson Street, on Chicago’s Near West Side. The inscription on the plaque was probably the shortest history of the disaster ever written: “The Great Fire of 1871 Originated Here and Extended to Lincoln Park.”
The next attempt to create some enduring marker came in 1917, when the Chicago City Council adopted an official flag. It looked very much like the flag on display today, with its background of three horizontal white stripes separated by two blue ones. The white stripes represent the city’s North, South and West sides, the blue strips Lake Michigan and the Chicago River.
The original flag had two six-pointed red stars in the central white stripe. One stood for the Great Fire of 1871, the other for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, which commemorated the city’s full and triumphant recovery. By the late 1930s, two more stars were added to honor two other important events, the 1812 Battle of Fort Dearborn and Chicago’s second World’s Fair, the “Century of Progress.”
Few people, even in Chicago, know what these stars stand for. Similarly, the crowds of tourists and residents who walk across the DuSable (formerly Michigan Avenue) Bridge pay scant attention to the bas-relief sculpture on the bridge house at the southeast corner of the bridge that depicts the rebuilding after the fire, titled “Regeneration.”
In 1955, the city fire department deliberately burned down the home where the Chicago Historical Society had placed its plaque. The purpose was to combine a training exercise with clearing the block for urban renewal. Six years later, on May 15, 1961, Chicago opened a $2 million training facility for firefighters on the block bordered on the west and south by Jefferson and DeKoven streets.
When it erected this building, the city finally — 90 years after the fire — commissioned a monument to the conflagration. It was designed by Egon Weiner, local sculptor and longtime professor at the School of the Art Institute. The 33-foot-high “Pillar of Fire,” on the plaza facing Jefferson Street, is an abstract representation of the disaster in three gracefully intertwined metal “flames.”
Chicago thus followed London’s example by placing its fire monument near where the disaster began. Indeed, if you go inside, you can see a marker of, we are told, “the exact spot where the Great Chicago Fire began.”
Why did it take so long for such a modest memorial, far less impressive than the London monument? Probably the main reason is that, for better and for worse, Chicago has never been big on commemorating its past. This was especially true in the era of the fire and decades after, when the city’s greatest asset seemed to be its limitless future, when the watchwords were newer, bigger and higher.
The closest thing the city has to a larger, more grand fire monument is an unintentional one, the Water Tower at the corner of Chicago and North Michigan avenues. The Water Tower was one of the very few buildings in the path of the flames that emerged undamaged.
In 1937, as part of the events commemorating the centennial anniversary of Chicago’s incorporation as a city, the tower acquired a plaque declaring it “a principal memorial of 1871 s Great Fire.” But it stands less for the fire than for the city’s indomitable spirit, best demonstrated by the rapid rebuilding after the disaster.
One of the tallest buildings in the city when it was first erected, the Water Tower is now dwarfed by the skyscrapers that surround it, including the 100-story John Hancock Center (now 875 North Michigan Avenue), at just under 1,500 feet. Perhaps the plaque on the Water Tower should instead appropriate the words inscribed in Christopher Wren’s post-Great Fire of London masterpiece, St. Paul’s Cathedral (No. 13 on TripAdvisor’s list of things to do in London), which served as his epitaph. Written in Latin, it reads, “Si monumentum requires, circumspice.” In English, “If you would seek my monument, look around you.”